Small Business Marketing as The Economy Recovers

As the economy starts to recover, small businesses need to find new and more efficient ways to get their message to consumers in order to grow the business without dipping too deeply into marketing funds. If you have a marketing plan my best advice to you is to revisit it and re-think how you’re promoting your business. Yellow pages and print ads are expensive and can’t target the demographics as specifically as on-line options. Today you would be prudent to narrow the focus and keep closer records on your return on marketing investment (ROMI). Technology offers many options to reach your target market which until now were unavailable to most small businesses. The benefit of using web technology is you can track specific details on who is accessing your information, allowing you the opportunity to follow up and promote your brand or products. Additionally, if you see something that is not working as well as you would like, you can instantly change or stop your promotion and ad spend.

Content is king, make sure you’re blogging, e-mailing, sending out press releases, and using news articles. Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow you to instantly and inexpensively bring your message to a large group within your demographic. Recently a new breed of on-line marketing and sales tools have become available that is consolidating the management of your web site, blog, social media and sales force. This new breed of marketing and sales tools are starting to emerge to handle the move to from a static web site to an interactive web site were you are able to see how your company is performing on all on line and off line fronts so, you can modify you marketing and sales campaigns instantly. I have found an excellent product called Knovila that will handle this and I feel it’s worth a good look.

So, in closing make sure you’re marketing and sales teams are in sync with your off line and on line marketing efforts allowing leads to be instantly passed to your sales force for immediate follow up. Before you make decisions on any of the options available to you, take the time to educate yourself on what’s available to you on line; search the internet and check your competitor's sites. Small businesses that thrive through this difficult time will be those who do their homework and stay abreast of the new options available to them.

This article was written by Joe Mediate Business consultants providing Executive Sales, Marketing knowledge & leadership to small to medium size companies looking to define their sales strategy and implement a marketing plan to increase their companies’ market exposure and generate additional sales dollars.